Greenland Blowing Away All Records For Ice Gain

Date: 30/10/15

Real Science

Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain this year. They have gained almost 200 billion tons of snow and ice over the past two months, which is more than 50% above normal. The surface of the ice gained more than 200 billion tons during the previous 12 months.

Five hundred billion tons of snow falls on Greenland every year. All of that has to return to the sea by either melt or glacier calving. Otherwise the ice would be piled up to the top of the atmosphere. Anti-science hacks at the New York Times take pictures of that essential process, and attribute it to “climate change”

Greenland’s ice sheet appears to be growing faster this winter (2014/15) than in recent years, according to new data from the Danish Meteorological Institute.

This increased rate of ice accumulation follows a virtual standstill in the loss of mass from the huge ice sheet last year that was reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the US.

Ice is currently accumulating at a faster rate than the average over the period from 1990 to 2011 and since the end of November it has been growing at its fastest rate in at least four years, according to the DMI data (see bottom panel of third graphic on the right). Ice accumulation is occurring over an area of the ice sheet that is significantly larger than the average area of accumulation for the period from 1990 to 2011, with particularly high accumulation rates in the south east.

Last month NOAA reported satellite data showing that the rate of ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet slowed significantly in 2014. NOAA’s annual Arctic Report Card document published in December states that there was a “negligible” loss of ice mass amounting to just 6 billion tonnes from the Greenland Ice Sheet between June 2013 and June 2014.